links for 2008-10-07

"YouTube announced today an interesting addition to its Insights analytics dashboard. Called "Hot Spots," the feature displays the "bounce rate" of viewers in any publisher's video on a second-by-second scale. Wondering if that joke you told went over well or not? YouTube will now tell you if a substantial number of viewers clicked away from your content at the moment your wisecrack went live."

"Social roles in online discussion forums can be described by patterned characteristics of communication between network members which we conceive of as ‘structural signatures.' This paper uses visualization methods to reveal these structural signatures and regression analysis to confirm the relationship between these signatures and their associated roles in Usenet newsgroups. Our analysis focuses on distinguishing the signatures of one role from others, the role of “answer people." Answer people are individuals whose dominant behavior is to respond to questions posed by other users. We found that answer people predominantly contribute one or a few messages to discussions initiated by others, are disproportionately tied to relative isolates, have few intense ties and have few triangles in their local networks. OLS regression shows that these signatures are strongly correlated with role behavior and, in combination, provide a strongly predictive model for identifying role behavior (R2=